March 7, 2011

A year ago Paul Conneally contacted me voicing his dislike of our recent work being labelled as “psychogeography” and “situationist”; for these are terms that are left-overs from the 70s.

He invited me to join him in Splacism: “a new movement a new set of ideologies […] with manifestos and the like – all still to be written including the definitions describing the movement”.

~~~

Last Tuesday I gathered people from different disciplines around me to give feedback on a newly-started project. After bemoaning the perceived lack of a peer group to one group of guests, the response was that I should celebrate my unique position between disciplines and become my own movement.

Later conversation rather suggested that one Hannah Nicklin identified with that too.

~~~

It wasn’t until later that evening that I remembered I already had my own movement – technosplacism as a subset of splacism.

24 hours later Hannah and I were brainstorming a manifesto.

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WE ARE THE SPLACISTS

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift.
We will affect and be affected.
We will look, and be seen.
We will expose and re-see.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.
We reject the beginning, middle and end.
We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter.
We will build our own constructs.
We will build our own bridges.
We will find the edges and push them.
We will fail spectacularly, vitally, elegantly.
We will span.
We will look up, down, under and behind.
We will leap.
We will invite others to do these things too.
We will make exchanges.
We will make adventures.
We will make beautiful moments.
We will reveal the ugly.
We will hold your hand.
We will whisper in your ear ‘let go’.
We will run, skip and jump.
We will be motionless.
We might dance.
We will dream.
We will be generous, but we may subtle about it, too.
We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

WE ARE ALSO THE TECHNOLSPLACISTS

We will learn how to use the tools that make the things we want to happen happen.
We will help others learn wherever we can.
We will construct our manifesto – collaboratively – online, because the Internet is also a space :)
We will shift between space, online and off, taking on the form and the arena that suits us best.
We will bodily augment the layers of virtual space, story, marketing, capitalism, that exist in the city, with our own stories.
We will hold the data-harvesting done in the city in the name of ‘games’ (foursquare, loyalty cards) accountable.
We will find our own energy sources.
We will learn how to flex the central nervous system of the city – the data streams in its weather detectors, CCTV, red light cameras – for our own aims.
We will release all that we can via creative commons, so that they can be reclaimed, remixed, re-purposed.
We will cut, and we will paste.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.”
We will pervade.
We will not be technosplacist when being splacist will suffice.
We will never underestimate the power of gaffa/electrical/masking tape
We will be artful. We will be skillful. We will fail usefully.

~~~

I don’t know if this is the Splacism Paul had in mind all that time ago – I’m not even 100% sure if this is the Splacism I have in mind now – but it’s a mighty fine start and writing the manifesto was a very interesting process.

We’ll let them sit for a while and see what they evolve into. As Paul said: “let [the words] become themselves and more…”

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Hello, my name's Nikki. I make things happen.

My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.

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